British police say 'invisible handcuffs' held 3 women captive

LONDON - Police investigating the case of three women who claim to have been held against their will for 30 years said Friday that the victims had been brainwashed and imprisoned by "invisible handcuffs" in an unremarkable house in South London.

A police commander leading the investigation also revealed that a couple in their 60s, arrested Thursday on suspicion of holding the three women, had also been detained in the 1970s, but he refused to elaborate. The two suspects, both 67 and unidentified under police protocol, were released on bail late Thursday after surrendering their passports.

"What we have uncovered so far is a complicated and disturbing picture of emotional control over many years," Commander Steve Rodhouse of the Metropolitan Police said Friday at a news conference. "Brainwashing would be a simple term, but I think that belittles the years of emotional abuse these victims have had to endure."

Rodhouse said the case was different from others involving domestic servitude because it was "not as brutally obvious as women being physically restrained inside an address and not being allowed to leave."

A Malaysian woman, 69, an Irish woman, 57, and a British woman, 30, were freed from the house in the Lambeth district last month after one of the women contacted a charity that helps victims of forced marriage, the police said Thursday. They said the youngest woman had apparently been held captive her entire life.

At another news conference Friday, Aneeta Prem, a founder of the charity, Freedom House, said the three women had access to TV but not the Internet. They had seen a documentary about forced marriage on television and memorized the phone number of the charity when it appeared on screen, she said, and the Irishwoman secretly obtained a cellphone to make a whispered phone call.

"To all intents and purposes, to the outside world this may have appeared to be a normal family," Rodhouse said.